Introduction

Yeahh Matt Ebb just commit my patch (SVN r27733) for the “Color Balance” node in Blender 2.5 Compositing node !!! Now it should be much easier to work with.

You can get a version of blender at Graphicall.org (any version above revision 27733)

There is still some precision issue on the color wheels, I guess some day it will be possible to move the color picker slower.

How to use it ?

First I would recommend you to un-check the “color management” setting in Blender 2.5 or it will make the blacks really hard to control.

If you are not so familiar with color grading, and push-pull techniques, I would really recommend you to watch Stu Maschwitz’s (Prolost) video tutorial using Magic Bullet Colorista. The settings won’t be exactly the same, but the approach quite the same though !

How does it works ?

I described the Lift/Gamma/Gain in a previous post, and mostly this node is based on the formulas specified there. We just slightly modified it so the 3 defaults values parameters are equal to 1.0 just like in Colorista. Which makes it much easier to control the blacks.Actually the “Color Balance” node before this revision was the same formula but with lift default value equal to 0.0

Some presets !

While making some comparison test between Colorista in After Fx and the “color balance” node in blender, I tried to mimic some of Colorista’s presets.
You can download the “Blender Color Grading Presets” here : http://code.google.com/p/ft-projects/downloads/list

you can leave it on, but the blacks will clamp much faster. To be honest I don't really know, maybe the formula needs to be tweak a bit in that manner. but if you try to switch your comp into linear workflow in AE, the same thing will happen with Colorista. So I believe it is supposed to behave this way. The gain & gamma will still smooth to control, just the blacks though. And since it is hard to slightly move the color wheel, you might get in the clamping zone really fast

Hi François, I was wondering what exactly was the issue if you don't un-check the “color management” setting. "It will make the blacks really hard to control"? What's happening with color management that prevents the Color Balance node to behave "correctly"?